Removing invalid characters in JavaScript

Question

Can someone provide a regular expression to search and replace illegal characters found

Example, removing �

I am not sure how many types of \'illegal\' char

Answer 1

Instead of having a blacklist, you could use a whitelist. e.g. If you want to only accept letters, numbers, space, and a few punctuation characters, you could do

myString.replace(/[^a-z0-9 ,.?!]/ig, '')

Answer 2

Invalid characters get converted to 0xFFFD on parsing, so any invalid character codes would get replaced with:

myString = myString.replace(/\uFFFD/g, '')

You can get all types of invalid sorts of chars here

Answer 3

Try this, it will work for all unexpected character like ♫ ◘ etc...

dataStr.replace(/[\u{0080}-\u{FFFF}]/gu,"");